I love 3-day weekends. Apart from the half-day spent moving daughter #1
into her new home, I vegged inside for much of the weekend. There's
something about rainy, soggy days that trigger my vegging instinct. I
finished a wonderful book, "Then We Came To The End" by Joshua Ferris
and for that I was thankful. I hope everyone's weekend was enjoyable.
This article caught my attention this morning. The new Lynnwood High School has
integrated science education activities with their onsite stream &
wetlands. Sounds like a great opportunity to bring science into the
real world, something we hope to be doing in the not too distant future with the Hylebos.
Here's a neat story of a man working to clean-up and preserve the Mid-Fork Snoqualmie River into a family-friendly forest recreation area & Wilderness candidate. There's somethng about working on a scale of conservation small enough to be able to know the land intimately.
"It's a place where I thought I could make a difference," said Mark Boyar,
52. "It was small enough I could get to know it and work hard at it.
The more I came here, the more I learned, and after all those years
it's very personal."
Dangers of Invasives and Little Biodiversity
An article about deers and Lyme Disease on Nantucket Island offers a few insights into the risks of introducing non-native species, and how lack of biodiversity can magnify disease risks.
In the annals of animals linked to human disease, there is surely a place for Old Buck of Nantucket.
Spotted in 1922 deer-paddling in the ocean,
he was scooped up by a fishing sloop and brought to Nantucket, an
island then without a single deer. And since the animal, nicknamed Old
Buck, was single, Nantucket took pity on him. With help from a summer
resident, a diplomat who had helped create the League of Nations, two
does were imported from Michigan in 1926, greeted at the wharf by a
cheering crowd
There's no cheering now, as the deer, which have spread like urban myths on the Internet, have become the prime vector for the ticks that carry Lyme Disease. Nantucket Island has one of the highest per capita incidences of Lyme.
“In a place like Nantucket or any other island, there’s less
biodiversity, which can mean more intense transmission of infections,”
said Dr. Sam Telford III, a tick expert at Tufts University’s school of veterinary medicine.
Houses built closer to deer habitat draw deer to tasty landscaping, and
that brings ticks closer to people. Officials estimate that there are
about 2,500 deer, about 60 per square mile — compared with 10 to 20 per
square mile on the mainland.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has listed Nantucket among the top three Lyme disease counties since 1992.
Invasives can wreak havoc on ecosystems, though rarely with as many direct impacts to humans as the introduction of Old Buck to Nantucket Island.